Dostoevsky (179 page)

Dostoevsky’s denunciation of the West, with all its “enlightenment,” reduces the entire social-political situation of that part of the world to an illustration of the two slogans that presumably define the European moral horizon:
Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous
(Everyone for himself, and God for all), and
Après moi, le déluge!
(After me, the flood!). These are the slogans of the most arrant and egoistic individualism, and they rule all of Western social-political life. These sayings “
everyone
there serves and believes in. At least all those who stand above the people, who keep them in check, who own the land and the proletariat, and who stand on guard for ‘European enlightenment.’ Why do we need that kind of enlightenment? We will find another sort here at home” (26: 152–153).

The Russian “wanderers,” Gradovsky had argued, were fleeing from the intolerable realities of Russian social life as represented by the characters of Gogol. The only
solution
Dostoevsky offers, as Gradovsky righly charges, is in terms whose tacit social dimension was a submission to the existing social-polical order, with vaguely hopeful intimations of some impending tsarist benevolence. Dostoevsky picks up this challenge by arguing that such Gogolian types, even though seemingly rooted in Russian life, had really become as alienated from the people as “the wanderers.” In truth, according to Dostoevsky, Aleko, Onegin, and others like them were the products of a European education, and “their relation to the people was that of a master to a serf.” If they had not been so haughty, if they had not begun “to marvel at their own nobility and superiority,” they might “have seen that they themselves were also Derzhimordas [a policeman in Gogol’s
Inspector-General
] . . . [and] they might have found a path toward reconciliation” (26: 157).

Gradovsky regarded “the wanderers” as “normal and admirable, admirable by the very fact that they fled from the Derzhimordas.” Indeed, Gradovsky had praised them “for their hatred of the slavery that oppressed the people,” adding that “they loved the people in their own way, ‘in a European way,’ if you like. But who, if not they, prepared our society for the abolition of serfdom?” Dostoevsky refuses such a claim outright, retorting that those who fled from Russia in “civic sorrow” did not hate serfdom “for the sake of the Russian peasant who worked for them and fed them and who, accordingly, was oppressed by them, as well as by the others.” Why, if “the wanderers” were “so overcome by civic sorrow that they had to run off to the gypsies or the barricades of Paris” (an allusion
to Turgenev’s Rudin, a character based on Bakunin), had they not “simply liberated their serfs with land”? Of course they would have had no income, and “one still needs money to live in ‘gay Paree’ ” (26: 157–158).

With a sideswipe at Herzen that all his readers would understand, Dostoevsky speaks of those who “mortgaged, sold, or exchanged (is there any difference?) their peasants and, taking the money thus raised, went off to Paris to support the publication of radical French newspapers and magazines for the salvation of humanity.” (Herzen had helped Proudhon finance the publication of his newspaper.) Dostoevsky accuses “the wanderers” of having such a low opinion of the Russian peasantry that they thought flogging them was still necessary. (Indeed, in a lengthy tirade against Turgenev in 1879 to Evgeny Opochinin, he asserted that all those Russian peasants Turgenev treats so poetically were flogged by his mother, adding, in an unworthy taunt, that Turgenev “would not renounce this pleasure” if it had still been allowed.)
⁷
He refers to all the scabrous anecdotes circulating about peasant family life among “those whose own family lives were frequently houses of ill repute,” and who accepted “the latest European ideas in the fashion of Lucrezia Floriani” (26: 159).
⁸
This gibe is again aimed at Herzen, who had written about the affair of his own wife with the radical German poet Georg Herwegh, and who himself fathered several children with the wife of his best friend Nikolay Ogarev.

To illustrate the contempt with which such “enlightened” Russians looked down upon the people, he then recounts an incident recently made public in Annenkov’s
The Extraordinary Decade
. After dinner “at a lovely Moscow dacha” in 1845, a party of “most humane professors, celebrated lovers and connoisseurs of the arts, . . . renowned democrats who subsequently became prominent figures of worldwide importance, critics, writers, and charmingly learned ladies” all went for a stroll. Catching sight of a group of peasants who had been working all day gathering the harvest, which caused the women partially to undress because of the discomfort of laboring all day in the burning sunlight, one wag remarked that “the Russian woman is the only one in the world who feels no shame in front of anyone!” Another added that “it is only the Russian [woman] before whom no one feels ashamed about anything!” Others objected, but Dostoevsky was convinced that even they would not have seen the point. “Why, it was for you, the universal wanderers, that she was working; it was her labor that let you eat your fill!” (26: 159–160)

Once again, quite unjustifiably, Dostoevsky declines to accord “the wanderers” any credit for having helped to prepare the way for the abolition of serfdom, “though naturally, all this entered into the overall total and was of use.” Of far
more weight, in his opinion, was the work of someone like the Slavophil Yury Samarin, who took an active part in the preparation of the reform and was a member of the commission that wrote the final statutes. Gradovsky, he notes, makes no reference at all to such people, “who were utterly unlike the wanderers.” These latter became “quickly bored . . . and once more they began to sulk squeamishly.” On receiving the “redemption” payments for their former serfs, “they began selling their lands and forests to merchants and kulaks to be cut down and destroyed; the wanderers settled abroad, beginning our practice of absenteeism.” As a result, Dostoevsky “simply cannot consent to accept this image, so dear to you [Gradovsky], of the superior and liberal person as the ideal of the real, normal Russian” (26: 160–161).

Extremely effective as a polemicist when drawing on such concrete examples of Russian life, Dostoevsky is much less so when forced to cope with more general ideas, such as, for example, Gradovsky’s sally that “personal betterment in the spirit of Christian love” is not sufficient to bring about a fundamental moral improvement in society. Even if such landowners as Korobochka and Sobakevich (characters in
Dead Souls
) had been “perfect Christians,” their faith, according to Gradovsky, would not have abolished serfdom. Although Dostoevsky cleverly seizes on this notion of “perfection” to advance his own case, the argument he propounds is far from being persuasive. No genuine, perfect Christian, he insists, could possibly own slaves, even though there will continue to be masters and servants; and Dostoevsky cites St. Paul’s epistles to his servant Timothy to prove that with perfect Christian love “there will no longer be masters, nor will servants be slaves.” Father Zosima had already preached this inner Christian transformation of the master-servant relationship from one of dominance to that of mutual affection, and Dostoevsky now holds up the image of “a future perfect society” in which people like Kepler, Kant, and Shakespeare would be freely served by persons recognizing their importance for humanity. By serving such geniuses voluntarily, the person doing so would demonstrate that “I am in no way beneath thee in moral worth and that,
as a person
, I am equal to thee” (26: 163–164).

Dostoevsky asserts his belief in the Christian ideal as an act of faith. “If I believe that the truth is here, in those very things in which I put my faith, then what does it matter to me if the whole world rejects my faith, mocks me, and travels a different road?” The value of such an ideal cannot “be measured in terms of immediate benefit, but is directed toward the future, toward eternal ends and absolute joy” (26: 164). This is the vision that Dostoevsky upholds as the Russian answer to Western “enlightenment.”

The single issue of the
Diary of a Writer
for 1880 was published on August 1, and both the Pushkin speech and Dostoevsky’s article evoked a new flood of commentary
from the unrelentingly hostile liberal and radical journals. Turgenev remained extremely upset at his role in the controversy, and V. V. Stasov, who met him in Paris in mid-July, reports him referring to the Pushkin speech as “abhorrent,” even though “almost the whole intelligentsia, and thousands of people, had gone out of their minds about it.” He “found unbearable all the lies and falsifications of [Dostoevsky’s] preachment,” his “mystical verbiage” about “the Russian all-man,” the Russian “all-woman Tatyana.”
⁹

Even some of Dostoevsky’s friends and political allies were unable to accept the full implications of his views. Writing to O. F. Miller, who was composing an article on the festival for
Russian Thought
, Yuriev remarked ironically that “it is necessary to cancel out all questions about political freedom because Zosima feels free in chains.” Miller’s article, which defended Dostoevsky, nonetheless concedes gingerly that “to quarrel with Dostoevsky . . . is of course quite possible if one does so on particular points; his strength is not in these, but in . . . his thought
as a whole
.”
¹⁰
The most penetrating critique of this kind, which raised fundamental questions about his social-religious ideas, came from the intransigent reactionary pen of Konstantin Leontiyev.

In mid-July Dostoevsky had complained about his embattled situation to Pobedonostsev, the secular head of the Orthodox Church, and his confidant consoled him in a curiously ambiguous manner. “If only your thought is anchored in yourself clearly and firmly,
in faith
, and not in vacillation—there is then no need to pay attention to how it is reflected in broken mirrors—such as are our journals and newspapers.”
¹¹
Pobedonostsev then sent Dostoevsky articles about the Pushkin speech published by Konstantin Leontiyev in three issues of the
Warsaw Diary
. Their dispatch would certainly have raised some questions in Dostoevsky’s mind. For Leontiyev deals critically with the social-religious questions raised by the Pushkin speech, contrasting its equivocations with the firmness expressed by Pobedonostsev himself in a recent graduation address, praised by Dostoevsky, to students of a school for the daughters of clergymen. Why should Pobedonostsev have called attention to Leontiyev’s article if not to indicate what he too found suspect in Dostoevsky’s convictions?

Leontiyev’s article, “On Universal Brotherhood,” contains a probing analysis of the wider implications of Dostoevsky’s views as well as of his literary work as a whole. Often called the Russian Nietzsche, Leontiyev occupies a unique place in the social-cultural spectrum of his homeland. Educated as a doctor, he was a novelist as well as a brilliant, slashing, highly original essayist, writing from an arch-reactionary position. He hated bourgeois Western civilization in all its aspects,
preferring that of the Ottoman Empire, where he had served as a diplomat; and he advocated a reign of tyranny and despotism in Russia as a defense against the infiltration of Western ideals of progress and universal human betterment. During his later years, he underwent an intense religious phase, spending 1871 in the severely ascetic ambiance of the Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos. Later, he lived in the Optina Pustyn sanctuary and took monastic vows shortly before his death. Leontiyev thus wrote from a point of view that was hostile not only to Gradovsky’s liberalism but also to Dostoevsky’s inconsistency—at least so he charged—in offering essentially Western ideals as the fulfillment of those of Orthodox Christianity.
¹²

Leontiyev well understood why those who had listened to Dostoevsky’s impassioned declamation at the Pushkin festival should have been swept away by his eloquence. Reading his words in print, however, and at a remove allowing for sober consideration, he finds them incompatible with Christianity as he understands it. True, he recognizes Dostoevsky to be one of the few Russian writers who has “not lost faith in man himself,” since he attributes moral responsibility to the individual rather than shifting it to society. In this respect, he has remained faithful to a truly Christian demand on the personality. Nonetheless, Christianity does not believe “unconditionally . . . either in a better autonomous personal morality, or in the wisdom of humankind as a whole, which must sooner or later create an earthly paradise.” It is this latter hope, so central to Dostoevsky’s sensibility, that Leontiyev rejects as contrary to Orthodox Christianity; he equates it, rather, with “the doctrines of antinational eudaemonism in which there is nothing new so far as Europe is concerned. All these hopes of earthly love and earthly peace can be found in the verses of Béranger, and even more in George Sand and many others.”
¹³
Leontiyev here discerns quite accurately the continuing influence of the Utopian Socialist Christianity of Dostoevsky’s youth—the Christianity that defined itself as the application of the love-ethic of Christ to earthly social life.